Part II: How can we create awareness for our offer among potential customers?
- duboislukas
- Apr 22, 2023
- 6 min read
Updated: Apr 23, 2023
Awareness will supercharge your business. But how do you find the most impactful activities that will bring you this awareness, fitting your budget?
This article builds on my previous one (Part I) on why awareness is important, who you want to know about you and what you want to be known for. Please read that first. Now I want to help you to actually find the right awareness-building activities for your business and situation. I provide a step-by-step guidance again that you can follow.
Build brand awareness via meaningful brand experiences
First, I want to pick up an important idea on awareness (=brand) building from the end of my last article: you can build awareness and a strong brand, even without engaging in extensive media and communication campaigns. I strongly believe in building brand awareness via meaningful brand experiences. Some of the biggest brands in the world did not achieve this awareness & brand image primarily via advertising campaigns, but because they offer great products or services and somehow interact with their customers in a relevant and value-adding way. Such meaningful experiences create positive perceptions and memories which people also talk about. A reputation is created and grows over time.
What do I mean with meaningful experiences? Of course customer can have meaningful experiences with you in the Usage Phase of their Journey, when they actually use or experience your product or service. But it can also be any nice, helpful or memorable experience in the Search and Purchase Phases.
If we take our fictive example company “Nature Toys”, such meaningful experiences in the Usage, Search or Purchase Phases could be: an unusual and fun installation in a toy store where you can try out and interact with the products; a really helpful guidance video on the website; an insightful articles about kids’ play and development on the website or an independent site; a special way to configure our individualize the toys when purchasing; a very generous try-out and return policy; real voices of other parent-customers who explain and recommend the products; a surprising box or bag that comes with the toy; a suggestion list of creativity games for kids birthday parties in the packaging; an ecological donation or other support of an ecological project with the purchase of each toy; and of course a really great product experience with many different facets of making it special, unique and surprisingly great.
You can check out again my articles on how to make your product or service offering really unique and surprising and how to come up with such special experiences in the Search and Purchase Phases.
On-top communication activities
So again, get these experiences right and somehow meaningful for your customers first and you automatically set in motion effective awareness building. Then and only then should you consider communication activities to amplify these meaningful experiences, to reach more potential customers and to let them know what is great about you. The principle is fairly simple: Do great things and talk about it! First, you need to be clear about what is special, unique and really meaningful in your customers‘ experience with you. And then you find ways to tell exactly that to your targeted customer group. Don’t just shout “Hello, this is us! Buy us!”, it is not very meaningful or memorable.
Do great things and talk about it!
So how do you do that? How do you translate meaningful experiences customers have with you into effective communication? How can you best reach your targeted potential customers and let them know that you exist and what is great about you? I will give you a 4-step-approach that you can follow with your team to design a communication plan that works for you.
Workshop Box
Write down a description of your target group. Be as clear-cut and narrow as possible, only then it is helpful as a basis for the next steps. Who are your most promising customers? You can use this list of criteria as a framework: income range, age, gender, living situation, media consumption, interests/attitudes/hobbies, … . < I assume here the simple case of only one predominant end-consumer target group. Depending on the business you are in, you might have several target customer groups. For example if you are in a B2B environment, or if you offer very different products or services to different customer groups. I want to keep the exercise simple here, sticking with one target group only. But if you have several and if they are pretty different, you also need to design several, distinct marketing approaches: different touchpoints, different activities, different key messages, as all of this is based on your target group.>
Collect touchpoints relevant to this target group and best suited to tell your key messages (= meaningful experiences). Be creative! Where do these people go, what do they read, what do they like to do? What would be a good fit with your offering and with what is unique about it? Always think if it is possible to appear there somehow, integrate yourself in these experiences?
For each touchpoint then, brainstorm communication activities of how you could appear there, integrate your brand and your key messages into the experience there for people.
Prioritize these touchpoints: You can use below matrix for that. Which touchpoints have the biggest potential to reach your targeted customer group? And for which touchpoints have you found the most promising and feasible activities?
Target group
for fictive company "Nature Toys":
Income | Upper Middle & Higher Income Classes |
Age | 30-45 (parents with young kids) |
Gender | Primarily women (mothers), typically more in charge of toys |
Living Situation | Primarily cities/suburban, family w/ small kids <7, flats or houses with decent space and extra kids’ rooms |
Media Consumption | Social Media (Instagram, Pinterest), favorite parent/mother influencers, Mom’s magazines, design/living/interior magazines, streaming services |
Interests/Attitudes/Hobbies | Mothers’ groups, nature trips, healthy cooking, Yoga, ecological conscious |
Communication touchpoints
Our fictive company “Nature Toys”, which sells ecological toys valuable for children’s development, could define their target customer group like in the table above. Based on this, they could brainstorm possible communication touchpoints like these examples: Mothers/Parents Magazines, Social Media Platforms like Instagram or Pinterest - for example in the form of fitting influencers, Social Media User Groups around Kids & Parenting, Interior Websites, Living/Design Magazines, kids fairs or events in key focus cities, daycare facilities, kids vacation programs or even pediatricians or children hospitals.
Communication activities
Communication activities at these touchpoints can vary greatly and it’s impossible to get very concrete here. But going through each touchpoint one by one, you will come up with a number of possible activities to become visible there or somehow integrate your brand, products or services in the experience people have at these touchpoints. I advise you to think about activities that go beyond classic advertising formats like SocialMedia Ads, Print Ads in Magazines or Posters in Stores or in the street. You can consider things like sponsorships, sample products for use, try-out events, educational formats, training sessions, editorial stories, joint events or offerings with partners/influencers, participation in discussions on Social Media Groups, Forums or Events and so on. Always think which experience might make your target customers talk about you to their friends. Especially valuable are activities that can be multiplied or amplified somehow. For example by capturing them with pictures and videos and sharing this content again on your Social Media channels, your website or via your partners.
Execution
When you have finally decided on the most promising touchpoints and the related activities to tackle first (and many others you can save for later), here again two important things to remember when executing them:
You need to pay special attention to ensure you are visually recognizable. It is absolutely crucial that your distinctive brand elements (see first article on brand awareness) are clearly and consistently visible in everything that you do. This is not a nice to have. If you fail to do that, people cannot connect their positive experiences with you in their brain. Your name, logo, colors, etc. need to register in their brains, otherwise it is all in vain.
Be clear to bring across in your communication as many brand associations as possible, as defined in your brand model (see first article on brand awareness). Don’t get diverted by creative design too much and thereby miss to communicate the most important aspects about you (e.g. your product/service and the aspects about you that are unique and special). These messages need to be crystal clear at first sight.
And yes, you might need external help with creating your distinctive brand elements and various communication materials for your selected activities. This could be an external designer or agency, depending on your budget. But I suggest you invite them to participate in this process above, to arrive at a joint understanding of what makes most sense for your specific situation. Don’t allow them to just create the usual communication materials for standard touchpoints. This will just be what everyone else does, without much impact.
Now get to work and build awareness! There is something impactful for everyone to do, even without any money or professional help.
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